1. What is your background?
I grew up in Canton, South Dakota, a town that boasted 2600 friendly citizens. At one time one of those citizens was E.O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and Nobel Prize winner in physics (1939). Our new grade school was named after him, and perhaps it was under that influence that my brother and I built our own cyclotron in our garage when I was 12. I was already a budding scientist, but biology was my thing. I read books about Robert Hooke, Pasteur and Van Leeuwenhoek and hoped I might find cures for diseases. I grew things in petri dishes in my closet and in a freezer that had been unplugged. My mom ended that career after our cleaning lady opened my closet and fainted. I next became a rock hound and went everywhere with my rock pick. I was lucky to have relatives in the Black Hills where I could find beautiful rocks for my collection.
My other love was languages and that was ultimately what I pursued. When I was seven, my father was very ill and spent a year in a medical c